GroovesharkGrooveshark - Free Legal Online MusicGrooveshark - Free Legal Online MusicRead More is definitely one of the most popular options when it comes to streaming music online for free, especially since it’s one of the few services which can still be accessed from anywhere in the world. The basic services provided are pretty impressive, from creating personalised playlists and saving them, adding songs to your favorites, and keeping up with the most popular songs of the moment.

With a few extensions and userscripts, Chrome users can make the service even better, from adding an in-built lyrics search engine, making it even easier to share songs from Grooveshark on social networks and controlling playback using keyboard shortcuts, you can really enhance and improve the Grooveshark experience.

Easily Share Songs

If you want an easy way to search for individual songs on GrooveShark, the website Tinysong makes it easier than ever, even giving you a shortened URL for easy sharing.

If you’re a Chrome user you can also benefit from a little extension that gives you a quick and easy way to search Tinysong without having to access the website at all.

Search results can easily be copied, or saved to your favourites, saved only within the app, not in your Grooveshark favourites.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts

If you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, the Chrome extension, keySharky will definitely appeal to you. After installing, open up the extension’s options to familiarise yourself with the shortcuts, or if you prefer, configure the keyboard shortcuts of your choice. With the shortcuts you can play/pause, go to the next or previous song, stop, add the song to your favourites, and adjust the volume, amongst other options. Of course for the shortcuts to work, you have to be on the Grooveshark page.

Generate Playlists

Groovylists makes it extremely easy to create playlists on Grooveshark using your existing playlists on iTunes, Spotify or and Last.fm. If you already have your playlists sorted out using any of these apps or services, with Groovylists you can quickly import and save those lists on Grooveshark .

With iTunes, you will have to export your playlist in XML format. To do so, simply right-click the playlist name, and select ‘Export.

Select the location on your hard drive where the file will be saved, and make sure that XML is the selected format.

Once the file is saved to your computer, you can then import it into Groovylists to generate a Grooveshark playlist. Once Groovylists has done it’s thing, click the link to open the playlist in Grooveshark where you can save it.

With Last.fm, you can export your playlists by entering your username, or anyone else’s for that matter. Groovylists will then import all the playlists that already exist and you can convert them at a click of a button. Spotify users will need to open their playlists, select all of the songs, right-click the selection and select Copy HTTP link, and paste the link into Groovylists, in order to generate a Grooveshark playlist.

Groovylists playlists are limited to a maximum of 200 songs, and we also did notice that it sometimes had a hard time reading song tags, with songs which weren’t in the iTunes playlist finding their way into the Grooveshark playlist

Replace Ads With Lyrics Search

Better Grooveshark, a userscript which works with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, alters Grooveshark in several ways. First, it removes the ad on the right-hand side of the page, which normally can only be removed by upgrading to a paid account. In addition, it replaces the advertisement with a lyrics search engine.

In addition to these main features, it also adds the title of the song that is playing to your browser tab.

If you don’t want all of the features that Better Grooveshark provides, there are also a few Chrome extensions that afford you the same features. Ads Free Grooveshark removes the advertisements from the website, and Grooveshark Lyrics adds the option to search for lyrics directly within the website.

What extensions and add-ons do you use with Grooveshark? Let us know in the comments.

Nancy is a writer and editor living in Washington DC. She was previously the Middle East editor at The Next Web and currently works at a DC-based think tank on communications and social media outreach.